For many families in California, the first week of August is now “Back to School” week. Here at Terra Firma, it’s “Back to Planting” week. Our fall plantings kick off with Cabbage and Celery on Friday, followed by Broccoli, Carrots and fall Potatoes next week. Strawberries will be planted at the end of the month. Once we start, it’s off to the races, with various different crops going into the ground every 7 days until the end of October. All told it will be about 40 acres worth.
Of course, while we are planting all these fall and winter crops, we are still harvesting summer ones. Obviously, we can’t plant crops in fields that already have crops in them — most of the summer crops we planted this year are still in the ground. So we need to have about 40 acres of unplanted fields prepped and staged for the successions of leafy greens and root crops that we will harvest through the winter and into next spring. This makes our farm unusual for our area; most farmland in Solano and Yolo County is used for growing only summer crops, and is normally planted by May 1st and finished with harvest before the rain starts in the fall.
Many of our fall crops this year will be going into fields that grew a soil-building “cover crop” last winter. Those cover crops don’t usually finish until April or May, and in years like this and last with wet springs, we are not able to get them prepared in time for our summer crops. It’s better to wait for things to dry out, get those fields ready in late spring, and have them available for fall planting. It also turns out that crops like Broccoli and Cabbage produce very well when they follow a winter cover crop.
As a small farmer, it’s easy to get into the mindset that you have to maximize every inch of your farm, and for years we operated with the goal of having every field planted to a new crops within 4 weeks after finishing the crop before it. But while that may achieve one type of “efficiency”, I have found it to be problematic in many other ways. One example is irrigation: fall crops really enjoy being watered with sprinklers to keep them cooler during the heat, but most summer crops don’t like getting their leaves wet so we irrigate with drip tape. If you plant one right next to the other, you end up making compromises that can negatively impact both crops.
So here at Terra Firma, in the peak of the summer season, many of our fields are fallowed. As we go through August and into September, there will be fewer and fewer unplanted acres as the fall crops fill in the gaps between the summer crop fields. Beginning in mid-September, our summer crops will begin finishing up. Some of those will get planted into winter vegetables, but most will be planted with cover crop for the winter. By Thanksgiving, the annual process will be complete: the warm weather crops will be gone and the cool weather crops will have taken over. The farm will be transformed once again.
If you’ve been out of town and just starting up your CSA box, welcome back. And if your family is starting up school, we hope you have a great Autumn. We’re hoping for an auspicious start to the fall planting season too.
Thanks,